November 19, 2015

Category: News

Author: Charles

Alive

It’s alive. I mean it is live. This morning I set Concealed Intent to “published” on Steam Early Access. As the page informing me of success suggested: “insert confetti here”. If you go to the Steam Store page or the big Steam widget on the games webpage it is possible to pay actual real money for it. It feels very weird that people might do so (not many though after just a couple of hours:).

Of course, the game is not finished. Not by a long way. This is more of a start than an end. Hopefully the feedback more players will provide will help make the game better. Already I have seen a number of good suggestions (from prerelease copies) – and no bugs yet!

There are four things I really want to get done before release (but Steam says not to promise anything, so these are not promises!):

4 extra single-player campaign missions

Steam achievements

A focus point for online duels to prevent two stealth players never finding each other

Being able to challenge your Steam friends to a game with custom time limits, rather than random match-making with whomever is online, which is probably no one :(

After those four I’ll hopefully have time to add more features as prioritised by the community.

Speaking of YouTube and prerelease copies. As mentioned in the previous post, I’m getting a ton of key requests. Strangely, today is the first day I haven’t woken up to 10+ key requests. On average I refuse 80-90%. Usually because: a large number of keys are requested; the email address is unverifiable; the requester has no videos in the last month; I don’t see any similar games reviewed; or, they have very few views (I look for around 80-100+ views on videos a few weeks old). I’m not sure if any of this is normal, but in the Steam discussion groups many gamedevs seem regretful of profligate key giveaways. However, I’m still checking all of them taking 5-10 minutes each.

That adds up. With all the other little unexpected release tasks, the time allotted to development has greatly suffered in the last week. I’ve probably only managed the equivalent of two previous workdays progress over the last 8 days.

Oh, and one last pro tip. Upload your game music to YouTube as private videos well before your release date, to ensure people without any rights haven’t somehow managed to “claim” your music! This happened to me and wrecked my weekend as YouTuber’s will not post videos of games so encumbered. Lucky, it is all fixed now and the copyright is back where it belongs.

Now back to emails and hopefully some dev work too. And definitely not hitting refresh button on the sales report, no, no, no…